THE MORNING AFTER
He looked in the mirror. A shaving one that magnified his pores, but seemed to leave his eyes alone. Or were they always such small, squeezed-up apertures with red whites and completely no pupil. He’d never learn, it seems. A skinful last night, and here he was examining the ruins of the night. He stuck out his tongue to see if it was discoloured.
No tongue.
He tried to poke hard with muscles at the root of his mouth, but they merely had no flag with which to wave. Panic was about to set in. Except he was yet insufficiently awake not to discount a drunken dream. Binge-boozing was like that: intoxication even to the very bottom of the mind’s imaginings: voluntary or involuntary hallucinations of a mismatched sleeping and waking, as the body itself tossed and turned amid the runkling covers.
Bingo! There was his tongue. Poking out like a flat fleshy fish flapping for breath.
No, <I>that</I> was the dream. The reality was tongueless. He tried to stir the cloudy frosty air with an imaginary flannel of yellow meat. Breath was in gusts of wild smoky terror at its missing friend the tongue. Terror is more terror with regard to nothing than it is to something.
His eyes now bulged, the pupils popping out like black peas, the redness in the whites brightening to a tone of scorched scarlet.
Even the shaving nick under the nose which had left a scar from the previous morning seeped a renewal of blood. He put a tiny tear of toilet paper upon it, creating a red archipelago upon the tissue which he even recognised as real geography given the calmness to recognise <I>anything</I>.
Scar tissue was the least of his worries. Yet patches of his skin were so thin, the skin itself seemed to threaten bursting the banks of its blood dams. That surely was imagination.
Tonguelessness was real. Thoughtlessness came to his rescue. If you didn’t understand anything, put it out of your mind, he thought. And he staggered into his living-room where the floor was scattered with spent bottles of hard spirit. He waded through thousands of them, it seemed. Clunking and dribbling beneath his feet. He slumped on to the couch – only to find the clunking magnified manifold, as he tried to make himself comfortable amid the rounded arches of funnelled glass. The neck nozzles intertwined like stone. snakes. Except the description was not on the tip of his tongue. He had more worries than verbalising the terror of the moment. Terror has no diary, as Terror cannot write.
This ‘morning after’ was so severe, it seemed, he actually wondered if it were after death itself. After was a peculiar word, one he couldn’t quite pronounce in his current predicament. The f became an s and the and ah & er a blur of groan. Words mixed and matched with foreign languages so foreign they were from the voices of aliens with speech patterns only possible with a completely different geography of the mouth. Human geography could never survive the ultimate bodily self-degradation as the binge drinking he had last night imposed upon his most valuable ally: himself. His self. A self that now floundered to gain a grip on reality.
Without a tongue, anything was possible. Words were said, in his hearing, that would never otherwise have been said. Words concocted from the very air around him, as the bottles clicked and clunked semi-articulately in rhythm to the still vilely gusting breaths of his body’s metabolism. The room compensated for his own inarticulate grunts and tongueless mouthings, by itself speaking through the natural settlement of its walls and the automatic creaks of its furniture as the cushions and springs recalled bodily inhabitants from the past. The man’s wife. And friends. Now no longer customary visitors to the room that now fondly remembered their visits. And the room thus spoke of the degradation with which the man had shamefully tortured his body and mind the previous night. This had been a sight all the room’s contents had witnessed in the very room which thus spoke of his wild cavortings of intoxication and later despair.
Morning itself spoke.
“Morning” it said.
And, in response, he tried to make small talk about the current cold snap in the weather.
Tried so very hard to enunciate the tiniest possible word. But he was too cold to speak … or even breathe.
